It’s Still “The Little Things”

N.B., as you may note, I like to ignore the rule about writing short, concise sentences, because if a reader cannot parse clear text unless a sentence is short enough for the attention span of a gnat, I do not much care whether they read on. There are some things I like about getting to be a Curmudgeonly Olde Pharte. *heh*

Oh, I have come to expect them, but “Dunning-Krugerands” who are willfully stuck on stupid abound in all realms of publication, nowadays–self-pub, trad-pub, online and “dead tree” magazines and newspapers, etc.–and I still just cannot get used to seeing words in print grossly misused, mind-boggling displays of subject-object confusion, amphibolous construction that renders a text as meaningless gibberish, baffling syntax, the use (abuse) of punctuation as random text-confetti, and evidence of willful disregard for doing one’s homework to support even a thin veil of suspension of disbelief when writing fiction (some scholarly, peer-reviewed “scientific” papers do a better job of supporting suspension of disbelief for their fiction than do many novels nowadays. . . )

For example, except for the rare equestrian fiction by an actual “horse person,” almost every piece of fiction I’ve read in the last decade or more that features horses and riders–westerns, fantasy, mysteries: all of ’em–have gotten nearly everything horse related wrong. And most of the wrong depictions have one thng in common: they hew very closely to popular, mostly “Hollyweird,” depictions of horses and riders, and they almost always simply treat horses as a low-tech, inconvenient substitute for cars and ‘bikes. (And I have yet to read any contemporary writer of a popular genre who treats horse manure with the respect it deserves. *heh*)

But, of course, that sort of “I already know evrything there is to know anout everything” attitude carries across to every bit of a “Dunning-Krugerand’s” writing (and speech, which is why subliterate morons get paid the big bucks to be TV taking heads).

Sometimes, given the proliferation of media influence, the only way to go through a day w/o killing brain cells by listening to Stupid Speech™ or Stupid Writing™ is to turtle up and avoid reading, talking with (or even just peripherally hearing) others at all.

The hermit lifestyle is looking more and more appealing. . .

Seriously: if someone does not even know the difference betweem “come here” and “sic ’em” (go-come, take-bring, etc.) then that person should 1. Shut up/stop writing and 2. Give their best shot at passing a basic English as a Second Language course (their first language being Advanced Stupidity).

OK, that’s enough of me being positive and uplifting. You’re welcome. 😉

When a Dunning-Krugerand* Writes Self-Pub Books

Read a *sigh* “cute” series of novellas (touted as novels but roughly 1/3 the length, or less, of anything I’d class as a novel). Irritating. OK, so they were REALLY fast reads. Clean plot/characters (for the most part–a “super upright, never tell a lie” character? Liar. And the character still viewed himself as honest *sigh*) But, one persistent problem: the writer(s) just did not do their homework. Bits here and there just would NOT work or were utterly and even sometimes laughably impossible, but were essential to the plot. “Dunning-Krugerand” moments* destroying suspension of disbelief, and suspension of disbelief was hard enough to begin with given the premise. Bits like that piled up and kept on piling up until the last “installment” was just a slog, finished just so I could notch up a bit of “reader masochism.”


*”Dunning-Krugerand” is a neologism coined–as far as I know–by Larry Correia to refer to those stuck somewhere on the lefthand side of the Dunning-Kruger Curve, having an unrealistic view of their knowledge base and competence, thinking of themselves far more highly than they ought. Usually, it is simply used to refer to those people, but here I have it to characterize the examples of the writers thinking they were using the right word/term but using exactly the wrong word/term, or describing a physical action or some equipment in such a way that they demonstrated they had no earthly idea how such worked in the real world, getting it so glaringly wrong as to completely destroy suspension of unbelief.

Sometimes, It’s the Not-So-Little Things

I often find myself hating to read Western novels. Oh, quite often such fare is the best place to find good heroes and bad villains in a struggle of good vs evil, a sort of morality play which, when well done, is not at all a didactic club over the head, and very often a well-told tale all-in-all, except for one thing: most of them feature horses that are treated as though they are machines, and not all that well-maintained machines at that. It seems many Western writers know diddly-squat about horses, having gained all they think they know from Hollyweird Westerns and other poorly-prepared Western writers.

Chaps my gizzard.